


Rara Avis

by shootybangbang (peonylanterns)



Series: Talking Bird [2]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Fingering, Masturbation, Smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 13:34:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19020976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peonylanterns/pseuds/shootybangbang
Summary: A collection of one-shots loosely set around future events in my ongoing fic, Talking Bird. Basically a dumping ground for smut and other snippets that don't yet fit in the main story.Though written with my OC in mind, details are generally kept vague enough that this can double as reader fic.





	1. In Which You Both Demonstrate How Not to Ride a Horse

**Author's Note:**

> [Summary]: After a couple of months apart, Arthur’s impatient to show you just how much he’s missed you. Smut and mild angst.
> 
> [Rating]: Explicit

When he slips his hand under your shirt, you grab his wrist.

“Arthur,” you hiss. “This is the main road.”

“So? Road’s empty.”

“Sure, but…” your words trail off as he cups your breast and traces a slow circle around your nipple.

“I hardly ever see you as is,” he murmurs in your ear. “May as well make the most of it.”

You slump against his chest and let go of his wrist, an unspoken acquiescence.

He takes his time undressing you, flicking each button open with the kind of delicacy you’ve seen him use when cleaning his gun. His fingers deft but careful, traveling slowly from the hollow of your throat to your navel as he lays you bare, inch by inch.

You close your eyes, the noonday sun still bright behind your eyelids as it pools over your skin. Prairie grass laps in yellow waves against Caliban’s Seat in the faint breeze, soft and gentle as the touch of his calloused fingertips running over your collarbone.

———

He told you once that he was a man made for violence, neither fit for nor deserving of intimacy.

Even now, every time he allows himself to touch you carries an echo of that past uncertainty. He’s never quite lost that unspoken reverence, that mute astonishment that you’d let somebody like him put his hands on you.

As always, he starts with a slow exploration, passing his fingers over every dip and curve you’ll allow him to, mapping out the shape of you in his head. Here is the slope of your neck, the swell of your breasts, the hard line of your sternum in between — all of it immortalized and sublimated to memory.

There’s a certain loneliness in it, you think to yourself. A reminder that all too soon you’ll be separated again with nothing but letters and cold recollection for comfort.

But this is solid. This is real. Turning your head, you rest your cheek against the slope of his shoulder and breathe in the scent of him — smoke and leather, gun oil and sweat.

———

He sinks his fingers inside you with slow, slick strokes, a gradual heat diffusing through your blood like liquid gold. Dipping into the shallows of your body, the soft dark of what remains unseen. Then deeper, until his palm grinds against your clit, the sudden friction of it sparking an intensity that has you biting your lip to keep yourself quiet. And there’s that familiar, hypnotic pleasure, that flutter of warmth and rush of sentimentality as he moves inside you.

You sit up straight to better watch the steady rhythm of his fingers as they pump in and out, your own apparent arousal glistening like dew across his knuckles.

“Like what you see?”

Your throat is too tight for words. Instead, you let out a weak “mm-hmm” that trails into a shivery sigh.

“Yeah,” he presses a kiss against the nape of your neck. “Me too.”

Arthur pulls his arm around your waist and leans into you, closing the gap in between. The hard line of his cock presses against your lower back, and the feeling of him so eager for you sets off a dull ache in your chest, like someone touching a finger to your heart.

Instinctively, you reach behind your back to unbutton his trousers, but he grunts and shakes his head.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says gruffly. “Plenty of time for that later.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Ain’t seen you in months. Just let me… let me refresh my memory a bit.”

Then he curls his fingers, and you gasp at the sensation, wrapping your arms around yourself to lock his own into place as he holds you.

“Five months is a long time, darlin’.” He’s breathing hard, grinding against you as he quickens his pace inside you. “Just memory and pictures ain’t enough to keep a man goin’. Shouldn’t even be out here, but I needed to see you.”

You feel heavy and sweet and full, like red fruit laden and dripping with nectar. Soft in his arms, your mouth full of words you have not the courage to say out loud, brimming with it, threatening to spill over. And all the while he touches you in that way only he knows how, coaxing you closer and closer to the edge.

“Arthur,” you whimper. “Oh, Arthur — ”

“Almost forgot all those pretty little noises you make when you come for me,” he breathes. “Like my own little songbird.”

You cry out when you come, a single weak tone that falls from your mouth in lieu of everything you want so desperately to tell him. Clutching at him as though he’s the only thing keeping you afloat, the rise and the fall of pleasure rushing through you and then the echo of it rippling to a faint stir of itself.

“I’ve got you,” Arthur murmurs. “I’m here.”

A sharp sting of tears pricks at the corner of your eyes. You blink, confused by the sudden surge of emotion brought on by his words.

It’s relief, you realize. It’s the absence of the uncertainty that always gnaws at your stomach when he’s gone. The physical immediacy of him is a kind of reassurance in itself — the broadness of his shoulders, the span of his hands across your body, the refuge of him close by.

But like all relief, it is temporary. A few days from now, he’ll be gone and you’ll have to face that gnawing emptiness again, that ache of loneliness that intensifies itself with each renewed parting. The specter of it looms over you even now, the whisper of its inevitability bleeding into the present.

He kisses your neck again as he pulls his hand away, letting go of you so that you can put yourself together again. Shakily, trying hard to keep your emotions in check, you fix all of your attention on pulling the strip of leather back through the metal loop of your belt buckle, on pushing each button of your shirt through its corresponding eyelet, over and under, over and under... 

But he catches you. He always does.

“You’re crying,” Arthur says, startled.

“Yes,” you admit.

“What’s wrong?”

 _Oh, nothing_ , is what you’d like to say.  _Just wishing we both weren’t so hopelessly entangled in the affairs of other men and that there were some promise beyond just the shaky premise of our next meeting._

But that’s a mouthful. So you wipe your eyes with the back of your hand in a quick, sharp flick of the wrist. “Nothing. Just… I missed you.”

His hand finds your jaw, tilts it towards him for a lopsided kiss. “Missed you too.”

One day, you tell yourself fiercely, when everything unravels, when you cut yourself out of the silk trap of your own making, then maybe… maybe…

But for now, maybe this is the best you can hope for. The present is fleeting, but you can savor the warmth of it against your skin, tuck it into memory to call upon later.


	2. In which Arthur takes matters into his own hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Summary]: As usual, jerking off fails to solve any of his problems.

It’s a cry of a heron that wakes him, the harsh, grating call cutting through the dark. The moon nearly full, waxing gibbous and spilling its pale light over the river, where the shimmering reflection of it swims through the water like trembling white fish.

He guesses it must be around 3 in the morning. Not late enough that he’s proper rested, not early enough to get up and move camp. A strange sort of limbo, suspended in time.

Nights like these, it’s always hard for him to fall back asleep. Instead, they usually lead him towards uneasy introspection. Thoughts of what could have been, what maybe _should_ have been. The faces of the dead floating in memory, the names of the living weighing heavy with dread. The type of man he’s become, the depths he has yet to sink to.

Usually he’ll turn to the consolation of self pleasure, figuring it’ll at least wear him out enough to ease him back into sleep. And he’ll lie there cock in hand, trying to conjure up some vague premise of lust.

Tonight though, it’s you that comes to mind.

He remembers the warm weight of you leaning against his chest on horseback, the glimpse of your breasts as you’d shifted his blanket around your shoulders. All events, at the time of their occurrence, perfectly chaste in nature. It’s only afterwards, given time to stew in his own desperate loneliness and his own emergent feelings for you, that they’ve taken on a sexual charge.

Arthur feels a small twinge of guilt for involving you so intimately in his personal fantasies — but you’ll never know of it, and he’s sure his attentions will shift soon enough, so what’s the harm of it?

So he yanks down his trousers and palms himself as he pictures your fingers skimming along the length of him, wrapping loosely around his shaft as you start out with a few experimental strokes. Your thumb swiping a bead of precum against the head of his cock, then your tongue tracing the wet path left behind.

In his head he can hear your voice, low and amused. _You this worked up over_ me _? Really?_

 _Can’t get you out of my head_ , he’d respond. And you’d smile then, gripping him in earnest as you start up a slow, steady rhythm, grinning wide when he’d beg you to go faster.

 _But you’re so cute like this,_ you’d say. _Why would I want this to end so soon?_

He groans as he imagines the way you might take him into your mouth, your lips soft against his skin and your tongue lapping against the underside of his cock. Still agonizingly slow, your eyes looking up into his as you pleasure him. Long, slick drags. Warm and wet, your pace slowly quickening as he urges you on, trying hard not to buck his hips. 

Already he’s close, his breath ragged as he jerks himself off with increasing fervor. And he’s thinking of you unbuttoning your shirt as you take him higher, of you pressing a hand between your thighs, your fingers coming away shiny with your own arousal --

He comes hard, eyes rolling back in his head, spilling himself into his fist with a weak moan of your name. For a few moments Arthur just lies there, riding out the sweet thoughtlessness of post-orgasmic bliss. Then that all too familiar loneliness sets in, even worse than before, and now all he can think about is the lack of a warm body beside him, the sheer hopelessness of his own pathetic yearning.

Along the horizon is a pale strip of dawn. Glowing orange-white beyond the mountain rim, eastwards, where you are. Scattered birdsong, the sound of crickets fading with the retreating dark. There’s time yet to fall asleep and put the whole sorry thing out of his head. Sighing, he wipes his hand on the grass, tucks himself back into his pants, and turns westwards, towards what fragment of night remains.


	3. In which crustaceans are harassed for the sake of exposition

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Request: Hi. I would love, love, LOVE to see a one shot flash of Lee. In a 3rd person narrative. From Arthur's POV. Because he's an artist and I want to SEE what she looks like from his eyes. ;)

Lee’s trousers are rolled up above the knee, and as she walks along the edge of the water she is altogether doelike. It’s in her small, careful steps as she searches for movement among the river rocks, the slender turn of her bare ankles. The curve of her spine as she bends down to pick up an errant clam shell.

It’s also in her likelihood of getting pointlessly shot anytime she’s in a situation where guns are involved, Arthur thinks to himself, rolling his eyes.

But, he considers with pencil and paper in hand, she makes as compelling a subject as any other. It’s either her or the landscape — and for the time being, he’d rather focus on something a little less static.

She folds her limbs close to her body as she  crouches down, the press of her thigh against her calf a narrow V that he delineates with a single dark pencil stroke. The arc of her neck and the set of her jaw he draws with slow, delicate touches, then the taper of her wrist as she rests her hand against a flat chunk of shale half-buried in the sand.

As he is now, sitting with his back against the grassy ridge that marks the river’s old boundary, he can’t quite see her face. But he can well imagine the dark, sharp cast of her eyes — and what’s the benefit of graphite over simple photography if not its potential for a little artistic license?

She digs her fingers into the sand and pries the rock loose, then makes a swift grab for the crayfish that darts out from below, pinching the section of carapace right behind its claws. When she drops the crustacean into the rusted tin bucket at her side, she glances back at him with a rather ridiculous expression of pride on her face — her smile imbued with all the triumph of a big game hunter — and he switches to a second sketch, this time focusing on the curve of her mouth. 

Then a third, a fourth. Lee wading in shallow water, the river mid-calf as she chases after a particularly elusive crayfish. Lee carrying the pail, her slim fingers curled around its wire handle, her silhouette in the hazy morning light stretched long and thin across the shore. 

The drawings themselves are loose and fluid, built more on motion than form. Messier than he’d like, but imbued with an innate sense of movement. There is a restlessness in them, the usual solidity of his outlines discarded in favor of thin, wavery approximation. But it looks like her, it breathes like her, all that tension and fidgety quickness wound into the figure of a woman.

“You think four’s enough?” she asks. The rolled up bottoms of her trousers are thoroughly soaked with riverwater, her skin speckled with sand. Grinning like the little fool that she is — her hands covered in scratches and nicks from crayfish pincers, but her face flushed and her eyes shining with an almost endearing enthusiasm.

 “Get a couple more little ones fer bait.” He flips the journal to a clean page when she ventures towards him, scratches out a hasty excuse of a horizon.

 “What’re you drawing?”

“Landscape,” he grunts.

Lee shades her eyes with her hand and gazes towards the faraway shapes of mountains, pale and soft in the shimmery summer heat. 

“Quite a tableau,” she comments, and her back is to him, the sunlight casting the shadow of her body through the loose fabric of her white shirt. A bright translucence, the subtle suggestion of her waist with all the delicacy of a veil. 

Well, Arthur surmises, committing the image to memory, he’s never been great at shading either. Wouldn’t hurt to practice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You have no idea how many times I had to edit this to get all the “you”s out of it 😭

**Author's Note:**

> Have an Arthur/Reader request? I'm tentatively taking requests on tumblr [@shootybangbang](https://shootybangbang.tumblr.com/).


End file.
